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A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

jasonhickel.org

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Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#61

Post by rory096 »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #30
grecy wrote: post #13

One of the most amazing things I learned reading the excellent "Factfullness" by Hans Rosling [1] is that the poorest countries in the world are currently improving faster than any country ever did, at any point in history. That's correct - countries like Lesotho and Central African Republic are improving faster than his home country of Sweden ever did, at any time. In only his lifetime Sweden went from having an inf…

"is that the poorest countries in the world are currently improving faster than any country ever did, at any point in history. " This isn't surprising and the reasoning isn't that hard. Economic advancement is very hard if you have to 'figure out how to do it' i.e. intensive R&D. But if you are 'far behind' and there are examples to copy, you can just copy. Developing nations not only have many examples, but they hav…

This phenomenon is known as convergence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence_(economics)

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#62

Post by Mirioron »

andrewwharton wrote: post #14
derriz wrote: post #9

Hickels rebuttal in the letter is that GDP cannot be used to gauge poverty which he claims has only been measured directly by the UN since 1981. But if you look around the world today, GDP/head is a remarkaby strong indicator of the level of poverty in a country. Nevermind that all the other quality of life stats: life expectency, child morality, average working hours, literacy, education levels, food affordability s…

To be fair, that's only a very small part of his rebuttal, dealing specifically with the period prior to 1970, as well as the fact that GDP estimates for this period "take little if any account of the goods and resources that people may have acquired from their land, from trees, from forests, from rivers and the sea, and in the form of gifts from relatives." From 1981 onward, I would summarize his argument as being t…

>- Using $1.90 as the baseline to beat is too low for what we would consider as being out of poverty.

It's called absolute poverty for a reason. Just because you're above the absolute poverty threshold doesn't mean you're not poor anymore. It just means that you can minimally survive. Whether you're poor or not depends on the society around you, because poverty determines how well you can participate in society.

He even cites this data:

>Using the $1.90 line shows that only 700 million people live in poverty. But note that the UN’s FAO says that 815 million people do not have enough calories to sustain even “minimal” human activity.

I went to check the numbers and I'm not quite sure where he took the numbers from. They're not really wrong, but I didn't find either number in the reports. The numbers I found in the report are closer together.

According to the FAO 2018 report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition [1] the number of undernourished people is projected to be 820.8 million in 2017. In 2016 it was estimated to be 804.2 million. In 2015 it was estimated to be 784.4 million.

The World Bank's Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018 report [2] gives a figure for the number of people living in extreme poverty at 736 million, but the latest figure is from 2015.

The 784.4 million and 736 million figures are remarkably close for such fuzzy data.

>- Most economic successes have not been due to neoliberal markets but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation.

Yeah, it was just a coincidence that when China stated opening up their markets that their quality of life improved immensely and hundreds of millions are lifted out of extreme poverty. When you're talking about economic success in general then you can't forget the ex-Soviet states either. The ones that embraced free markets the most recovered the most.

>- Most quality of life improvements have not been due to neoliberal globalization but simple public interventions including free healthcare and education.

All of which requires enough economic success to support such policies and societies.

>- Progress is slowing relative to the resources available to tackle the problem.

Because the percentage of the population in extreme poverty is shrinking.

[1] http://www.fao.org/state-of-food-security-nutrition/en/

[2] http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/poverty-and-shared-p...

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#63

Post by beaconstudios »

Maro wrote: post #16
grecy wrote: post #13

One of the most amazing things I learned reading the excellent "Factfullness" by Hans Rosling [1] is that the poorest countries in the world are currently improving faster than any country ever did, at any point in history. That's correct - countries like Lesotho and Central African Republic are improving faster than his home country of Sweden ever did, at any time. In only his lifetime Sweden went from having an inf…

I read the Factfullness book, and I thought it's really poorly argued. I remember my BP was through the roof on the plane when I was reading that. HR is not believable imo. (I work in data, I'm a physicist.)

would you care to expand on why? If you're wanting to inform others that the book isn't accurate, stating that it's wrong and it made you angry that it was wrong is not a very convincing argument.

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#64

Post by ddebernardy »

roenxi wrote: post #23
derriz wrote: post #9

Hickels rebuttal in the letter is that GDP cannot be used to gauge poverty which he claims has only been measured directly by the UN since 1981. But if you look around the world today, GDP/head is a remarkaby strong indicator of the level of poverty in a country. Nevermind that all the other quality of life stats: life expectency, child morality, average working hours, literacy, education levels, food affordability s…

> promoters of apocalyse narratives ... [b]oth hard left and hard right both require people to believe the "world getting worse and worse" There are still veterans of WWII alive today, and that was pretty much an apocalypse for the people involved. Just because the last 50 years have been peaceful doesn't mean good times are guaranteed, we should remain cautious of threats. Change is extremely rapid. Many of the issu…

> There are still veterans of WWII alive today

There are still veterans of WWII alive today that were born at a point in time where the idea of fighting a new world war was unthinkable.

FTFY

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#65

Post by benj111 »

huffmsa wrote: post #49

England, what's with the clown show you've got going on at your unis? First the naked Brexit lady now this guy. 1) subsistence agrarian lifestyles were not better than our industrialized world. If Mr Hickel disagrees, he should lay down the pen and pick up the plow. 2) decreased child mortality and increased lifespans (thanks industrialized medicine!) means more people alive but not necessarily economically useful =>…

What's England got to do with this, and who's the naked Brexit lady?

He isn't saying agrarian is better than industrialised. He's saying industrialisation was forced on them by colonialisation.

Read about the Congo free state for example [1].

Also. The early stages of industrialisation aren't particularly good for a nations poorest, Britain's industrial revolution was not a land of plenty for the poor, they just went from being poor farm hands, to poor factory workers.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#66

Post by JackPoach »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #24
JackPoach wrote: post #15

Yes, I think that Pinker's attitude 'don't mess with liberal capitalism model, it's working miracles' kind of shuts off any possibility of real critics of real problems that we are facing today.

Pinker is not arguing that economic neoliberalism is perfect. Almost nobody is.

Sorry, but I don't see the word 'perfect' in my statement. I stated what I stated and I think I am fairly accurate when I say that Pinker's main premise is that modern global neoliberal capitalist model is fighting poverty much better than anything else.

(Which is probably not true if you agree with the Pinker opponent POV).

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#67

Post by pizza234 »

grecy wrote: post #13

One of the most amazing things I learned reading the excellent "Factfullness" by Hans Rosling [1] is that the poorest countries in the world are currently improving faster than any country ever did, at any point in history. That's correct - countries like Lesotho and Central African Republic are improving faster than his home country of Sweden ever did, at any time. In only his lifetime Sweden went from having an inf…

> Those poor countries are improving faster than Sweden ever did... so in just one more lifetime they'll be where the world leaders are today.

This is a very simplistic extrapolation. There are significant factors, primarily social/cultural ones, that will halt the relative development of those countries, sooner or later.

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#68

Post by ddebernardy »

haberman wrote: post #58
colechristensen wrote: post #2

Can anyone summarize what is going on here? It seems like a flamewar with graphs, and not interesting enough to invest the time in reading.

This is a story of competing narratives. Pinker says the world is improving by most measures, and this is a credit to our global system (though of course there is always room for improvement). Many people, including Jason Hickel, strongly object to Pinker's characterization. They think the global system is fundamentally broken and flawed and we should be ashamed for letting it happen. Ultimately it's a capitalism vs.…

There's more to that in the post. Hickel also raises that e.g. the recent improvements are actually due primarily to China and East Asian tiger economies, which have had protectionist policies; the rest of the South, by contrast, have seen a degradation of their poors' situation on a backdrop of neoliberal policies.

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#69

Post by marcus_holmes »

ljcn wrote: post #53
benj111 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The reason is climate change." The reason isn't climate change. The Central African Republic has just come out of a civil war. Of course things are going to improve rapidly, because that farmer that was in a refugee camp can now go home and grow enough to barely feed his family. You can't extrapolate that out to the CAR overtaking first world countries in a generation simply because that farmer hasn't been educated…

You misunderstood - the user wrote that the improvement probably won't continue due to climate change (which is expected to negatively impact developing countries more than developed).

this is the difference between ecologist thinking and economist thinking.

economists think in curves - starting from a low base it's very easy to improve fast, but the rate of improvement drops off as it nears the global average.

ecologists think in straight lines - the rate of improvement is x/year, so in 50 years the improvement will be 50x and they'll be richer than Sweden, who are only improving at (x/10)/year.

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